from Hacker News

It takes $420k per year to run Lichess

by i0exception on 1/16/22, 11:47 AM with 266 comments

  • by rickdeveloper on 1/16/22, 3:35 PM

    The author did an AMA on Reddit 9 months ago that I think is relevant here: https://old.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

    In particular:

    How they remain free: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

    On his salary: https://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/mpasyl/i_started_lic...

  • by freewilly1040 on 1/16/22, 5:38 PM

    It's truly amazing that a product with the reach of Lichess can be run so cheaply. Comments here criticizing the hosting costs extremely myopic - dev time isn't free, and doing a rewrite to chase down hosting savings isn't necessarily a good call.

    I just signed up for a monthly donation. I complain about the ad supported internet all the time, but had never donated to LiChess. This thread is a good reminder of how far dollars to support projects like this can go.

  • by jka on 1/16/22, 12:48 PM

    I was wondering what the cost per game is on lichess, and fortunately the linked spreadsheet includes the answer: lichess currently runs at a cost of $0.00022 per game (4545 games to the dollar).

  • by c4m on 1/16/22, 4:51 PM

    I love Lichess's feature comparison page (https://lichess.org/features), which helps users decide whether to upgrade to a premium account.

  • by tholman on 1/16/22, 3:00 PM

    Lots of people saying "You can improve costs here!" without factoring in the developer time/learning/upkeep dollars it would take to do that. Sometimes the best solution is the one you know that will be easiest for you.

  • by bluecalm on 1/16/22, 4:13 PM

    It only 420k because they pay themselves minimum salaries. The founder/lead dev is easily worth mid 6 figures on the market and yet his salary is not even 60k EUR.

    It's a great project, great quality and run at a low cost but it's all that because it's run by people who sacrifice their financial situation to make their idea happen.

  • by jeremyjh on 1/16/22, 3:23 PM

    In this thread: people with zero knowledge who can cut costs drastically without impacting the service (that they have never used and don't understand).

  • by altvali on 1/16/22, 5:14 PM

    As someone who is working on a similar project (a chess mmo) and looking to validate a business model in order to get funding, how are they covering the costs? The answer usually is "donations", but there are only 402 patrons on https://lichess.org/patron and Thibault said on twitter that the average donation is $8. That's $3216/mo, less than a tenth of monthly costs. Is the rest coming from the swag store? From coaches? How much do the donations surpass the costs? Lots of missing pieces from the revenue puzzle.

  • by amelius on 1/16/22, 2:37 PM

    Main developer gets a monthly salary of $4705, is that normal in Europe? (Assuming Europe because they pay French taxes).

  • by leros on 1/16/22, 3:35 PM

    For reference $420k is about the cost of 2 employees at a typical tech company.

  • by marcrosoft on 1/16/22, 3:09 PM

    5k in French taxes to run a non profit site, why?

  • by _zooted on 1/16/22, 1:57 PM

    > $68,600 in Servers

  • by booleandilemma on 1/16/22, 5:48 PM

    So, 4 developer salaries for a service used worldwide. Not bad at all.

  • by chubot on 1/16/22, 5:42 PM

    I love lichess! In addition to the web interface, it's got a great iPad interface too.

  • by anyfactor on 1/16/22, 5:37 PM

    > Accountancy - 5,160 > Independent Audit - 6,000

    I studied accounting at university and no one plans to do anything but auditing or consulting. I still love accounting, gives the most straight answer of how a business is run. Case in point.

  • by wenbin on 1/16/22, 6:05 PM

    I’m actually surprised how cheap the server cost is , given the scale of linchess… Great job!

    Recent years, I have a feeling that HN commenters would assume server cost should always approach $0, not matter how big, or how different a real world online service is different from their single page web app side project :)

    For any server cost sharing posts, we’ll see people making comments like “I can run this under $10/month” . Ha

  • by wodenokoto on 1/16/22, 1:06 PM

    Where does funding come from?

  • by sharno on 1/17/22, 5:46 AM

    I wonder google doesn't show Lichess in the first page when I search "lichess"?

  • by killingtime74 on 1/16/22, 11:22 PM

    I’m surprised French taxes are so high for a non profit

  • by anthk on 1/16/22, 7:52 PM

    And freechess.org ?

  • by iqanq on 1/16/22, 5:01 PM

    JVM and then probably Cassandra as DB. Had they used something other than Java, it would've costed 10% of what it does. A rewrite may make sense.

    I don't use Lichess. If I did, I would have donated. But after knowing that they throw money down the sink like this, I would be hesitant.

  • by faangiq on 1/16/22, 7:00 PM

    He should take a better salary and figure out a more viable business model. Running it this way is a risk to its future.

  • by oneepic on 1/16/22, 4:13 PM

  • by devit on 1/16/22, 2:19 PM

    It's the minority of the total spend, but it seems the hosting costs are too high.

    For example, they are paying $266/month for 16 thread 128GB 3.8TB SSD, but you can rent a better machine for 99$/month from Hetzner (AX61-NVME).

    They are also spending $40k/year on "data protection services" (?!?) and 60k for "site moderation" (they could instead not moderate or rely on third-party forums and messaging services they don't need to moderate).

  • by BossingAround on 1/16/22, 1:17 PM

    For those completely unaware (like I was), lichess [1] seems to be a chess server.

    Not sure whether they need AWS scale and couldn't cut costs down from 420k a year to something cheaper. Naively, this seems like something MS could sponsor by providing long-term discount.

    That said, I have no idea how much cheaper this would be on other cloud providers, or whether they even have the need to cut down costs. For all I know, they might be making 10x of that in donations.

    [1] http://lichess.org

  • by whalesalad on 1/16/22, 2:34 PM

    Lots of pets here, not many cattle. When you get to this scale, tools like Kubernetes make more sense. Then you can just think about your system in terms of "how much cpu/ram/storage do I need total?" Unless every one of those servers is running at or near capacity, there is a lot of cash being wasted there. There is also a maintenance cost, too. If one of these vital boxes goes down, what is the downtime implication and restoration cost?

    I am not saying any of this to be critical of Lichess. There are different ways to solve these problems, and their way is clearly working. This also happens slowly over many years, so it is hard/impossible to see the end state until you are there. The app is very quick and responsive. I got my ass handed to me on my first anon game :) My feedback is more for the community here in the context of using this as a byte-sized case study.

    At the end of the day we are reading and writing 1's and 0's to a network device, or a disk. Have to imagine you can run and persist chess games with a lot less resources.